Hampton Sides - Hellhound on His Trail - The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His Assassin

"The experts said it couldn't be done," Wallace proclaimed to roaring crowds in Los Angeles. "This points out again that, really, the experts insofar as politics are concerned are the people themselves. If you can get on the ballot in California, you can get on the ballot of any state in the union!"

Eric Galt could begin the New Year with the satisfaction of knowing that he had done his small part to put George Wallace's name on the official ballot for the California presidential primary in June.

A FEW DAYS later, January 4, 1968, Galt went to see another L.A. hypnotist, the Reverend Xavier von Koss, at his office at 16010 Crenshaw Boulevard. Koss was a practitioner of good reputation in Los Angeles and the president of the International Society of Hypnosis. Galt consulted with Koss for an hour and discussed his desire to undergo treatment. But to Galt's irritation, Koss pressed him with larger questions. "What are your goals in life?" Koss asked him.

Galt tried to answer him as narrowly as possible. "I'm thinking about taking a course in bartending," he said.

"But why are you interested in hypnotism?"

Galt said he thought hypnosis would improve his memory and make him more efficient in carrying out mental tasks. "Somewhere," he said, "I saw where a person under the influence of hypnotism can solve problems in thirty seconds that would take an ordinary person thirty minutes."

Koss could sense that there was more to Galt's interest in hypnosis than merely mind fortification. Koss thought he was a lost soul, someone searching for some kind of validation--and a way to fit into society. "All persons, 176like myself, who work in the profession of mind power can readily discern the main motivational drive of any person," Koss later said. "Galt belongs to the recognition type. He desires recognition from his group. He yearns to feel that he is somebody. The desire for recognition for him is superior to sex, superior to money, superior to self-preservation."

Koss advised Galt that in order to reach a better and more meaningful life, he had to see in his mind's eye what he wanted to achieve--a statement that Galt seemed to agree with vigorously. He recommended three books for Galt to read-- Psycho-Cybernetics , by Dr. Maxwell Maltz; Self-hypnotism: The Technique and Its Use in Daily Living , by Leslie LeCron; and How to Cash In On Your Hidden Memory Power , by William Hersey. Galt was grateful--he jotted down the titles and would later buy every one of them.

Yet books alone would not accomplish much, Koss cautioned. He began to tell Galt about all the hard work that lay before him if he truly wanted to improve his station in life. Koss said, "You must complete your course 177in bartending, you must work hard, you must go to night school, you must construct a settled-down life."

It was all too much for Galt, and he began to retreat from the conversation. "I lost him," 178Koss said. "I could feel a wall rising between us. His mind moved far away from what I was saying to him."

Still, Galt said he was interested in undergoing hypnosis, and the Reverend Xavier von Koss was willing to oblige. He began a series of tests to ascertain whether Galt would be a good candidate. Quickly, however, he detected "a very strong subconscious resistance" to his procedures. "He could not cooperate," Koss said. "This is always the case when a person fears that under hypnosis he may reveal something he wishes to conceal."

11 WALKING BUZZARDS

FEBRUARY 1, 1968, was a rainy day, the skies leaden and dull. On Colonial Road in East Memphis, the spindly dogwood branches clawed at the cold air. A loud orange sanitation truck, crammed full with the day's refuse, grumbled down the street, past the ranch-style houses, past the fake chalets and pseudo Tudors, where the prim yards of dormant grass were marred only by truant magnolia leaves, brown and lusterless, clattering in the wind.

At the wheel of the big truck 179was a man named Willie Crain, the crew chief. Two workers rode in the back, taking shelter in the maw of its compacting mechanism to escape the pecking rain. They were Robert Walker, twenty-nine, and Echol Cole, thirty-five, two men who were new to sanitation work, toiling at the bottom of the department's pay scale, still learning the ropes. They made less than a hundred dollars a week, and because the city regarded them as "unclassified laborers," they had no benefits, no pension, no overtime, no grievance procedure, no insurance, no uniforms, and, especially noteworthy on this day, no raincoats.

The "tub-toters" of the Public Works Department were little better off than sharecroppers in the Delta, which is where they and their families originally hailed from. In some ways they still lived the lives of field hands; in effect, the plantation had moved to the city. They wore threadbare hand-me-downs left on the curbs by well-meaning families. They grew accustomed to home owners who called them "boy." They mastered a kind of shuffling gait, neither fast nor slow, neither proud nor servile, a gait that drew no attention to itself. All week long, they quietly haunted the neighborhoods of Memphis, faceless and uncomplaining, a caste of untouchables. They called themselves the walking buzzards.

The truck Walker and Cole rode in--a fumy, clanking behemoth known as a wiener barrel--was an antiquated model that the Department of Public Works had introduced ten years earlier. It had an enormous hydraulic ram activated by a button on the outside of the vehicle. Though the city was in the process of phasing it out of the fleet, six wiener barrels still worked the Memphis streets. These trucks were known to be dangerous, even lethal: in 1964, two garbage workers were killed 180when a defective compactor caused a truck to flip over. The faulty trucks were one of a host of reasons the Memphis sanitation workers had been trying to organize a union and--if necessary--go on strike.

Having completed their rounds, Crain, Walker, and Cole were happy to be heading toward the dump on Shelby Drive--and then, finally, home. They were cold and footsore, as they usually were by day's end, from lugging heavy tubs across suburban lawns for ten hours straight. The idea of wheeled bins had apparently not occurred to the Memphis Sanitation Department. Nor were home owners in those days expected to meet the collection crews halfway by hauling their own crap to the curb. So, like all walking buzzards across the city, Walker and Cole had to march up the long driveways to back doors and carports, clicking privacy gates and entering backyards--sometimes to the snarl of dogs. There they transferred the people's garbage to their tubs while also collecting tree cuttings, piles of leaves, dead animals, discarded clothes, busted furniture, or anything else the residents wanted taken away.

Now, as Crain, Cole, and Walker headed for the dump, their clothes were drenched in rain and encrusted with the juice that had dripped from the tubs all day. It was the usual slop of their profession--bacon drippings, clotted milk, chicken blood, souring gravies from the kitchens of East Memphis mingled with the tannic swill from old leaves. Plastic bags were not yet widely in use--no Ziploc or Hefty, no drawstrings or cinch ties to keep the sloshy messes contained. So the ooze accumulated on their clothes like a malodorous rime, and the city provided no showers or laundry for sanitation workers to clean themselves up at the end of the day. The men grew somewhat inured to it, but when they got home, they usually stripped down at the door: their wives couldn't stand the stench.